Witness the origins of Middle-Earth in the… | Little White Lies

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Wit­ness the ori­gins of Mid­dle-Earth in the Tolkien trailer

13 Feb 2019

Words by Charles Bramesco

Two people in period costume, a man in a dark jacket and a woman in a light dress, in a dimly lit setting.
Two people in period costume, a man in a dark jacket and a woman in a light dress, in a dimly lit setting.
The new film explores the younger years of the Lord of the Rings author.

Everyone’s favorite part of the stan­dard biopic comes when the sub­ject stum­bles through some­thing in their ear­ly life that will lat­er be trans­mut­ed into their work. They glimpse an image or utter a phrase, and just like that, they’re seized by genius in a light­ning-bolt moment that makes artis­tic inspi­ra­tion look like com­ing up with a par­tic­u­lar­ly clever pun.

Like so many fic­tion tropes mer­ci­less­ly sav­aged by Walk Hard, this trick has nonethe­less remained in heavy use, and it gets a good work­out in the new­ly released first trail­er for Tolkien.

Dome Karukoski’s film chron­i­cles the boy­hood years of JRR Tolkien, from his time as a plucky orphan (Har­ry Gil­by) shuf­fled through the state’s child­care sys­tem to his stint at uni­ver­si­ty. There, as a strap­ping young man with the stur­dy build of Nicholas Hoult, he formed a so-called fel­low­ship” of friends and pre­pared for a great reck­on­ing of good ver­sus evil – not the Bat­tle of Helms Deep, but World War I.

Pri­or to the glo­ry of a lit­er­ary career that yield­ed the Lord of the Rings and Hob­bit nov­els, Tolkien fell for one Edith Bratt, whose stead­fast devo­tion got him through the trau­ma of com­bat. She’s por­trayed in the film by Lily Collins, who’s hav­ing quite a year play­ing the patient wives of famous (or infa­mous) men.

The trail­er con­cludes with a plume of flame ris­ing over the front, per­haps in the shape of a drag­on of the tow­er of Mor­dor. One can only hope we’ll get a sim­i­lar scene in which Tolkien makes friends with a short­er, more brusque school chum pro­fi­cient in axe-play.

Tolkien comes to the­aters in the UK on 3 May, then to the­aters in the US on 10 May.

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